


répos

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [54]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Couch Cuddles, Disabled Character, Just Add Kittens, M/M, Mentally Ill Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-21
Updated: 2014-09-21
Packaged: 2018-02-18 05:32:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2336978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Shut up, Steve," Bucky says, comfortably, which is as good as admitting defeat. It isn't admitting defeat - if Steve ever brings up the argument again, Bucky'll be just as stubborn - but it's as good as. </p><p>Steve pulls the blanket down from the back of the couch, listens to the reader's voice, and traces abstract patterns across the middle of Bucky's back until, a couple hours later, Bucky's phone reminds them they should eat.</p><p>(or: two points of view on the days after <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/2322938">the previous fic</a><a>)</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	répos

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of [**this series**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), which is for short-fic associated with my fic [**your blue-eyed boys**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477), because I needed somewhere to stash it. 
> 
> This was basically a, if not unicorn, at least purring cat chaser to the previous fic.

1\. Bucky spends the next few days quiet, sprawled on the couch or the futon and, when possible, up against Steve. Abrikoska seems to approve, at least: if Bucky's stationary, that means she can jump up beside him, or on him, and bump her head into an available limb or sometimes even his face until he pets her and then go to sleep on her own personal heated mattress. 

Steve figures this cat's got a pretty good deal out of life, really. But he also has to admit she eases a worry he's had for a while, at least a little bit, especially since he can actually see Bucky relax every time she settles on or near him - no matter how much he tries to pretend annoyance. And she might only be a cat, and not the brightest cat ever (she regularly gets herself lost under blankets after she's burrowed in on purpose, for example), but she's a living thing that wants to be around Bucky all the time, any time she can. 

Be on or, if she can't for some reason, even smushed up against him. Without being threatening at all, or really demanding much. She's something that wants to touch him, and that he can touch.

And sometimes Steve worries. 

A lot of the time, really. 

 

 _Other than to cut me up, beat me, fight me or repair me, Steve, the last person to touch me was you._

Those words have stuck in Steve's head since the moment Bucky said them, and every now and again - mostly at times like this - they shake loose from where he's folded them away and fall back into the forefront of his mind. They pull at him, scrape around his head. 

He's never repeated them, doesn't think he ever will, not even in paraphrase, but he has brought up the basic subject with Sam, discussed the facts, with more or less the predictable outcome. 

_Oh look_ , Steve'd said when he'd watched Sam's expression more or less disappear, _it's your therapist face._

_What? I do not have a therapist face,_ Sam replied, scowling, and Steve'd smiled a little crookedly. 

_Yeah, you do,_ he'd said. _It's the one you get when you're being real careful to avoid reacting to something you want to look horrified by, at least until you can figure out how you should be reacting._ He'd considered and added, _Maybe concerned, rather than horrified, with normal cases. But still._

_Yeah, okay,_ Sam admitted. _Maybe I have that face._

_You can go right ahead and look horrified,_ Steve'd pointed out. 

_Force of habit, really,_ Sam'd replied, _but yeah, if I didn't have that habit, horrified is about where I'd be. Add another tick to the 'that's fucked up' box, why don't you._

Steve hadn't really needed telling, though. He'd actually started paying attention to how often people touch one another, after Bucky's words kept eating at him. It's more often than he'd thought, more often than he'd ever noticed: hand-shakes and shoulder-claps, helping someone up from a chair, getting someone to do up a zipper or a button, a clasp on a necklace. Brief, short moments, less than seconds sometimes. Bumping into people on the subway, sitting beside someone on the bus; dentists, doctors, masseurs, hair-dressers, manicurists - 

Even people who go out of their way not to touch people most of the time, like Tony or Natasha, have places, people where that eases up. They have Peppers, Rhodes', Bartons. Even if they don't, there's just being around people - you're going to bump into someone, you're going to end up passing too close, and they're going to act like it's normal. People exist around other people.

Forget all the dogs, cats, hamsters and birds people pick up, to fill in for the Peppers and Bartons they might not have yet. 

Steve thinks of Tony's hand on his shoulder on the helicarrier, just before the first explosion and the near-disaster afterwards. Tony hadn't really wanted to touch him and Steve sure as hell hadn't wanted him to, but it'd still been . . . normal. A human thing. A people thing. An obnoxious people thing, sure. But Tony'd been trying (and succeeding beyond his wildest dreams) to get a rise out of Steve, had _known_ it would be obnoxious. 

Had cared, a lot, about how Steve would interpret that hand on his shoulder. 

And a while ago, he'd been reading the memoir of a priest who'd spent six years isolated and imprisoned by extremists, and Steve'd hit a passage where the man described how he started to hope his interrogator would come again, to _look forward_ to interrogation, because at least it was another human being who acknowledged he existed. 

Steve'd had to stop reading. He'd erased the book off the tablet, too. 

And that, with all that, Steve's tried to think about none of that, nothing, for decades. And then gives up, because he can't. 

Steve's not sure how you make up for that. He's especially not sure how you make up for it when, to date, the number of people Bucky can stand to have touch him numbers one - Steve - and _maybe_ a half, depending on the day, and how careful Elizabeth is, and there only a hand on his shoulder or elbow. 

And all the more so when Bucky won't ask, and gets twitchy if he thinks Steve's silently offering too much, is indulging him in a way that makes life inconvenient for Steve. And he won't really take Steve's word for it when it comes to deciding when that is, or whether Steve cares that much about the inconvenience, which he almost never does.

A cat might not be all of the answer, but at least she's something. 

 

This week, at least, Bucky seems to care less about the inconvenience. Steve's reserving judgement on whether that's a sign of some kind of increased comfort, or if it's just because Bucky feels that flattened. 

Either way Steve actually doesn't _mind_ spending a lot of his time as a pillow, or a body-pillow, or some other support while Bucky reads or listens to something or occasionally just stares into the distance with half-closed eyes. More or less the opposite of minds, when it comes down to it. 

Bucky insists nothing's bothering him, that nothing's got him when he's doing that, the zoned out eyes-half-closed staring. That he just feels too brain-dead to parse text or audio beyond music. For now, Steve opts to believe him. It's true enough that he doesn't twitch if Steve moves, or flinch if Steve switches from having his arm across the back of the couch to idly kneading at the perennial knots in Bucky's neck, or marking out the acupressure points on his skull and that'd be the sign he was checked out somewhere bad. 

Steve only asks, "You okay?" once, when the whole acupressure cover just degrades to soft-scratching his fingers over Bucky's scalp, and Steve still feels Bucky losing a minute degree of tension more now and then as time goes on. 

Getting Bucky to relax is a process, not an event. 

"Mn," Bucky says, his non-committal noise. He takes a deeper breath, seeming to wake up a little more, and uncrosses his arms to rub his forehead. "You remember that one time I _did_ get the flu, or am I making that up?" 

"Just before you turned twenty," Steve says, "when you were the worst-tempered patient who ever _lived?_ " Steve'd felt kind of vindicated that week. 

"Hnh," Bucky says, sounding amused. "Sounds right, yeah. And there was something like a week afterwards, wasn't coughing or fevered or stuffed up anymore - " 

"But you were still tired all the time? Yeah," Steve says, mouth curving up in what by now's a kind of fond memory, although if pressed he'd have to admit he'd kind of wanted to smack Bucky upside the head at the time, and say _welcome to my life, you jerk_. 

He hadn't. Besides, Bucky hadn't actually been complaining at that point, just tersely explaining when he dropped stuff or stumbled, or fell asleep if given half the chance. And completely failing to do what he always wanted Steve to do, which was rest up and take it easy. Another tick for the _just as bad as each other_ box. 

"Closest I can say is I feel like that, in my head," Bucky says, amusement fading back into the quiet. "Except this time I can't be fucked to do anything about it except wait until it goes away." 

"Okay," Steve says, after about a second's thought. He can buy that. Understand it, even. Might be a reason to worry if it goes on too long, but frankly Bucky could probably use a few days of letting himself just be flattened and tired, if he can. 

After a few minutes Steve decides the current book is too depressing, dog-ears the corner and drops it on the floor, making the cat pick up her head and _mrr?_ at him. Then he finds the remote and flips through until the stereo's pulling from the iTunes, flips through until he finds the audiobook of _Watership Down_ and hits play so it picks up from where they left off. 

Then he scoots down the couch a bit, and Bucky only needs mild encouragement to resettle himself on top of Steve, head resting on the front of his shoulder. Steve gets another few micro-degrees of relaxation out of him for that, so he'll count that a win. Besides, it lets him rest his hands under Bucky's shirt on his lower back, and that wins him some more. 

After a few minutes of listening, Steve says, "You're wrong. You are clearly Hazel and I am clearly Fiver." 

"I am not even having this argument with you, Steve," Bucky says, in a very put upon tone. Steve pretends to ignore him. 

"Blackberry's Gabe," he says, musing. "Holly's Monty. Bigwig - " 

"Dugan," Bucky says, at the same time Steve does. 

"Makes Dernier Dandelion, and Morita Silver," Steve finishes. 

"And you Hazel and me not in the book," Bucky says, actually sounding vaguely sleepy. Which doesn't usually mean that he's falling asleep, just that he's settled and content, so Steve has another moment of self-congratulation. 

"Nope," he says, and doesn't bother to elaborate. 

"That's your argument?" Bucky says after a few minutes of only the voice of the reader filling the silence. 

"I don't need an argument," Steve replies. "Truth speaks for itself. Rabbits," he adds, "do not end up super-soldier experiments. That makes you Hazel and me Fiver, QED." 

"Shut up, Steve," Bucky says, comfortably, which is as good as admitting defeat. It isn't admitting defeat - if Steve ever brings up the argument again, Bucky'll be just as stubborn - but it's as good as. 

Steve pulls the blanket down from the back of the couch, listens to the reader's voice, and traces abstract patterns across the middle of Bucky's back until, a couple hours later, Bucky's phone reminds them they should eat.

 

 

2\. The thing is, honestly, that Bucky feels less crazy right now than he has done for months, at least. 

Not _better_. He feels like absolute gutter-kicked _shit_ , actually. He can even tell where some of that feeling-like-shit is showing up in his body instead of his head, because there's enough that something inside threw up its metaphorical hands and said _sorry, I have no idea what to do with this, it'll have to go over there._

He's tired, his brain feels bruised, and if half the time there's a layer of cotton-wool between him and the memories that won't quit, they're still there. And there's the other half the time. They're just memories, he's not drowning in them, but that doesn't fucking make them fun. 

For a while he tries counting how many times he can actually tell that one memory of his right hand being crushed is different from another. Conclusively different. It's morbid and probably fucked up, but he comes up with seven he's pretty sure really are separate. 

He doesn't even bother playing that game with the times he's been shot. For one, he's hard to kill and he's pretty sure just shooting him was their last-ditch way of getting him back under control: shoot him, dig the bullet out, strap him somewhere till he healed. Probably. For another he figures it's a waste of time, because a lot of his targets shot back. So those memories he just ignores. 

It's fucking miserable and he knows it's _why_ he's so tired, why he doesn't want to move or do anything. But it's not drowning him. His head throws the shit-reels of memory at him, and it's not fun, but he can think _yeah, that happened_ and not get caught in it, not feel it on his skin again, not end up flooded with the adrenaline (and God knows what else, now, he doesn't and Hell will probably freeze over before he'll be willing to let a doctor find out) he'd need to keep it from happening now. 

And the stupid warped bit of him that tangles up pride and fucking animal panic shrieks about not having done anything but sit and half-doze all day, or worse sit leaning on Steve and doing the same, but right now it's not that hard to throw back, _yeah, and?_

Or _and I fucking owe you what, exactly?_

And that makes it at least quiet down, if not actually shut up.

He doesn't think it'll last. He can feel all the frenetic shit on the edge of his mind, scrabbling at the edge of whatever's in its way now and in maybe a few more days that warped piece will manage to remember the answer is _everything, you owe me everything, you owe me being here, you owe me_ being _at all, I'm the reason you have Steve again, I'm the reason you're anything more than a puppet, I'm the reason you're alive, I'm the reason you ran,_ and every fucking thing else, but for now - 

For now it's kind of nice that if he's going to feel like shit, he can have some of the things that make him feel better without having to fight bits of himself for them. And maybe later he can use this again, use _these_ memories to smack the screaming down. To make that part let him _believe_ when Steve says he's fine with Bucky using him as a pillow for a few hours. 

It won't do sweet fuck all for feeling humiliatingly pathetic, but for that he can always try throwing the old _compared to what the fuck else in the last couple years exactly?_ and see if it takes. 

For now he's comfortable lying more than half on top of Steve, and all that shit's far away, and the reader's voice on the audiobook helps drown it out. The idiot kitten settled herself on Bucky's back about ten minutes ago and about five minutes ago the vibration of her purr petered out into silence, meaning she's pretty deeply asleep, the twit. 

Steve's heartbeat is a faint echo under Bucky's ear, his slow breathing louder; the same breathing moves his abdomen against Bucky's, rise and fall, and Bucky's wearing one of his older, softer shirts so the scrape of the cotton isn't much. One of Steve's hands is still resting warm on Bucky's lower back, the other lazily tracing the collar of Bucky's shirt, and in the distant space that he's got right now, and that'll probably get lost to the other shit once it works its way back, Bucky carefully handles a thought. 

The thought that Steve's willingness to stay like this might not all be for him. 

On the audiobook the rabbits wrestle with how "be fruitful and multiply" becomes a problem when you don't have any females, and Bucky thinks that maybe part of what makes the book comforting is the sheer fucking ridiculous of it, of rabbit politics and myths when your average rabbit was actually stupider than the feline twit sleeping on his back right now. 

It maybe starts to approach the absurdity of his own fucking life, and Steve's, when little else does.

At some point the fucking alarm that Steve put in Bucky's phone is going to ring, and Steve's going to fucking insist on finding food, but it's not happening right now. Right now Bucky's warm and comfortable and Steve's hands plus the voice narrating the story are enough to keep Bucky's head out of the shit he could be thinking about, and frankly that's probably a God-damned miracle of some kind. 

So he keeps his eyes closed and sits with it for a while, until that fucking alarm goes.


End file.
